Detailed Addiction Recovery Quotes

Detailed Addiction Recovery Quotes

Our liberation comes through a person, not a system of ideas and principles. "Everything we need for life and godliness" ultimately comes "through our knowledge of Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1:3). ― Edward T. Welch

Addiction is like a curse and until it is broken, its victim will perpetually remain in the shackles of bondage. ― Oche Otorkpa

I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going. ― Lawrence Block

I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going. ― Lawrence Block

Spiritual work and psychological work are both necessary to reclaim our true nature. Without psychological strength, spiritual practice can easily become another addictive distraction from reality. Conversely, shorn of a spiritual perspective we are prone to stay stuck in the limited realm of the grasping ego, even if it’s a healthier and more balanced ego. ― Gabor Mate

Accept that the addiction exists not because of yourself, but in spite of yourself. You did not come into life asking to be programmed this way. It’s not personal to you—millions of others with similar experiences have developed the same mechanisms. What is personal to you is how you respond to it in the present. ― Gabor Maté

The obesity epidemic demonstrates a psychological and spiritual emptiness at the core of consumer society. We feel powerless and isolated, so we become passive. We lead harried lives, so we long for escape.

In Buddhist practice people are taught to chew slowly, being aware of every morsel, every taste. Eating becomes an exercise in awareness. In our culture it’s just the opposite. Food is the universal soother, and many are driven to eat themselves into psychological oblivion. ― Gabor Maté

Self-regulation does not refer to “good behaviour but to the capacity of an individual to maintain a reasonably even internal emotional environment. A person with good self-regulation will not experience rapidly shifting extremes of emotional highs and lows in the face of life’s challenges, difficulties, disappointments and satisfactions. ― Gabor Maté

Self-esteem is not what the individual consciously thinks about himself; it’s the quality of self-respect manifested in his emotional life and behaviours. By no means are a superficially positive self-image and true self-esteem necessarily identical. In many cases they are not even compatible. People with a grandiose and inflated view of themselves are missing true self-esteem at the core. To compensate for a deep sense of worthlessness, they develop a craving for power and an exaggerated self-evaluation[.] ― Gabor Maté

Drugs do not make the addict into a criminal; the law does. When alcohol was prohibited, drinkers were breaking the law. ― Gabor Maté

In the internal world of the psyche, [...] freedom means [...] the ability to opt for our long-term physical and spiritual well-being as opposed to our immediate urges. Absent that ability, any talk of “free will or “choice becomes nearly meaningless. ― Gabor Maté

In the realm of emotional freedom and conscious decision making a penniless hermit may enjoy much more latitude than a status-addicted millionaire who, still compensating for unconscious childhood hurts, is driven by an insatiable need to be feared or admired. ― Gabor Maté

Freedom of choice, understood from the perspective of brain development, is not a universal or fixed attribute but a statistical probability. In other words, given a certain set of life experiences a human being will have either lesser or greater probability of having freedom in the realm of the psyche. ― Gabor Maté

There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently—mostly out of desperation to replenish their supply. ― Gabor Maté

If we want to help people seek the possibility of transformation within themselves, we first have to transform our own view of our relationship to them. ― Gabor Maté

If our guiding principle is that a person who makes his own bed ought to lie in it, we should immediately dismantle much of our health care system. Many diseases and conditions arise from self-chosen habits or circumstances and could be prevented by more astute decisions. ― Gabor Maté

No organism in nature is separate from the system in which it lives, functions and dies, and no natural process can be understood in isolation from its physical and biological context. From an ecological perspective, the addiction process doesn’t happen accidentally, nor is it pre-programmed by heredity. It is a product of development in a certain context, and it continues to be maintained by factors in the environment. The ecological view sees addiction as a changeable and evolving dynamic that expresses a lifelong interaction with a person’s social and emotional surroundings and with his own internal psychological space. ― Gabor Maté

Mindfulness can be practised throughout the day, not only on the meditation cushion. There are many techniques for this but they all come down to paying close attention to one’s experience of each moment, without seeking distraction.

When I go for walks now, I no longer have earphones piping music into my head. I try to stay present to the physical, aural and visual sensations I experience, as well as noticing my mental processes and reactions. ― Gabor Maté

When infants are anxious or upset, they are offered a human or a plastic nipple—in other words, a relationship with either a natural nurturing object or something that closely resembles it. That’s how emotional nourishment and oral feeding or soothing become closely associated in the mind.

On the other hand, emotional deprivation will trigger a desire for oral stimulation or eating just as surely as hunger. Children who continue to suck their thumbs past infancy are attempting to soothe themselves; it’s always a sign of emotional distress. ― Gabor Maté

Acceptance in the context of adult-to-adult relationships may mean simply acknowledging that the other is the way he or she is, not judging them and not corroding one’s own soul with resentment that they are not different. Acceptance does not mean saintly self-sacrifice or tolerating an eternity of broken promises and hurtful eruptions of frustration and rage. ― Gabor Maté

Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside traps us. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. ― Gabor Maté

God is still in the blessing business and my prayer is that He continues to do business with you ― Anonymous Sinner